Reading

Finally getting around to finishing Isabel Quintero’s Gabi, A Girl in Pieces – which is good because I’m teaching it next week. The novel is written in first person journal entries – pieces – so, in form, the novel is a girl in pieces (get it?). I think this is where we’ll go next week in class.

Writing, from Microblog

I gave in this year. Instead of asking students to read an assignment sheet before class, I started rolling it out as an editable google doc in class. I have them read and annotate it together with comments in the margins. I then respond to their comments in the doc real time, and we talk through issues I hadn’t anticipated. Sometimes I’ll leave blanks in the sheet and ask “what do you think should go here?” Or, “I went back and forth about this part, what do you think?” The comments and my responses then stay in the margins of the assignment sheet for when students are later working on the assignment, or – even better – for students who couldn’t be there in class that day. It’s messy, but what I ask students to do is usually messy anyway. Call me professor messy. The practice has me thinking about other ways to unfix assignments and assignment sheets, letting students speak into what I’m asking them to do.

Teaching

One thing I’ve learned this semester: as much as students need their professors, they need each other more. And that’s beautiful.

Listening

Inamorata by Methods of Defiance. Jazzy, chaotic drum and bass.

Fondue Party by Polyrhythmics. Five songs, 23 minutes — just follow the flute.

A longer story: There was a certain window of time I would stop by Dave Adam’s house on 48th street in West Philly at 8:15pm every last Thursday of the month to borrow one of his turntables on my way to DJ the monthly Philly Gathering. The RCA cords on the turntable worked – mind didn’t – but it was also missing a leg. So with the turntable came a stack of old BodyRock flyers rubber banded together to work as a leg.

A few weeks ago Dave tweeted about Teena Marie’s two albums released on Cash Money Records in the early 2000s. Dave’s point was that there is a whole body of music in the early 2000s by 80s R&B stars, made at the tail end of their careers, that many of us failed to listen to. His point: It might not be what it was, but there are some gems in there. I think Dave was right. So I dug up the albums this week and listened. You can hear on the intro to her first CMR album, La Doña, a pretty corny attempt to fit her into some kind of crime syndicate family narrative. I picture Teena sitting on her own Cash Money Records album cover throne. But there are some gems on the album. And by the second album two years later, she’s really in the groove for most of the album. Dave was right.